1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a wearable type life support apparatus for measuring and determining various states of a user by using a wearable device and giving life support by an information service such as medical administration or personal navigation according to the user's situation, a life support method, and an advertisement providing method.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the society becomes complex, stress in daily life is said to be one factor of various problems of the modern society because stress adversely affects the health of people by, e.g., causing life-style related diseases such as heart diseases or mental diseases such as depression, and also triggers crimes.
“Stress” originally means stimuli from the external world (Yoshinosuke Tadai, “What is Stress?”, Kodansha Bluebacks). Currently, “stress” is taken to also include adaptive reaction against stress. When the adaptive reaction exceeds human limitations, various diseases or mental disorders are said to occur. Alternatively, these disorders occur presumably when the sympathetic nerve and the parasympathetic nerve become unbalanced due to a change in rhythm of life.
How to cope with stress is important for the people of this day. The best measure against stress is stress control, i.e., to eliminate stress. Various methods are recommended to this end: “to see or listen to images or music that prompts relaxation”, “to do anything one likes”, and “to shout loudly”.
However, a person who is pressed with business every day is often unconscious of the buildup of stress. He/she is heavily fatigued, and in the worst case, comes to a sudden death. It is therefore important to realize and control stress before it becomes serious or prevent stress from building up.
As the importance of measures against stress is recognized, development of apparatuses for acquiring vital information of a user and measuring and managing user's stress is an urgent necessity. Several apparatuses have already been proposed.
However, since a person experiences stress in a variety of situations in daily life, the vital information to be measured largely changes depending on external situations such as the peripheral environment and the position of the person as well as internal situations such as action and mental condition. For this reason, it is difficult to accurately grasp user's stress state unless the vital information is analyzed and determined in association with user's behavior.
To make the user realize stress, he/she must be notified when or immediately after stress builds up. Otherwise, the user cannot be aware of stress, and if the user is unaware of the stress, life style and the like can hardly be improved.
Hence, demand has arisen for the development of a system which can determine the stress situation in daily life and notify a user of it so as to assist stress control.
For stress control, it is important in terms of care to provide the user an optimum measure to cope with the situation. However, such a technique is still absent.
For portable type information communication devices such as handyphones, ringing tones or conversing voice at a public place as in a train poses a problem. To solve this problem, a technique of setting a vibrator call mode as a “manner” mode or receiving a message by an automatic answering telephone function is already widely used. However, since urgent contact is sometimes required, a mechanism capable of easily communicating a situation or message without voice communication is required.
In the world of the Internet, advertisement display (banner advertisement) according to the Internet use situation of a user, such as Internet advertisement, is widely used. However, information providing according to each scene of user's daily life and business that uses the information providing service for advertisement have not been realized yet.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a life support apparatus and method which can determine the stress situation in daily life and notify a user of it to cause the user to realize the stress or can support the user of a method of eliminating stress or care against the factor that has caused the stress, on the basis of the situation of the user.